Stephen Williams
Main Page: Stephen Williams (Liberal Democrat - Bristol West)Department Debates - View all Stephen Williams's debates with the HM Treasury
(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Stephen Williams (Bristol West) (LD)
The hon. Lady just made the hypothetical point that a 2% increase in interest rates would cause those costs to rise. Undoubtedly that might be true were rates to rise, but they have not risen, and one reason market interest rates have not risen is that the Government are dealing with the deficit at a time when the Labour party has not come forward with any policies to tackle the emergency.
Stella Creasy
I hope that the hon. Gentleman is not being complacent about the cost of living, its impact on people in his constituency and the fears of many about what an interest rate rise would mean for their monthly mortgage payments. One thing that worries me is that a lot of people are borrowing just to make ends meet; they are borrowing not for investments, holidays or fancy televisions, but to pay their rent and mortgages and to put food on their families’ tables. His complacency about interest rates not rising any time soon is misplaced.
Sheila Gilmore
I am afraid I do not share the hon. Gentleman’s confidence that the review will indeed cover the issues, although something might be pending. The hon. Member for Solihull (Lorely Burt) is no longer in the Chamber, but I was interested to hear her say that “we” would all be happy to see the regulations “we” would be bringing forward. I do not know who “we” were, but it suggests that the Government’s plans are quite well advanced and that the hon. Lady is privy to their thinking, as we are not. At the end of the debate, I hope we shall hear what the regulations are and what will happen.
Warm words are not enough. Some of the organisations involved have tremendous resources behind them, yet there is so little control of their operations. Their services can seem attractive because they “solve” people’s immediate problems. Regrettably, at this stage credit unions cannot compete. Castle credit union in my constituency had to give up its shop-front premises in the main street because it did not have the resources to continue to pay the rent. It has moved into an office in a community building and is still functioning, but it has much less presence than it would have if it were still on the high street, where people would be able see it from the bus and pop in when they were doing their shopping. Now that it is tucked away in the community office, people might not know where it is. The situation is not helped by the fact that the local community newspaper, which used to advertise such facilities, has had to shut up shop owing to cuts in its funding. That will make it even harder for people to find the credit union.
Stephen Williams
I agree that sometimes it might be hard to find a credit union, although the one in my constituency is based on Cheltenham road, a main road. Perhaps credit unions need to go out and find customers; for instance, Bristol credit union had a stall at St Paul’s carnival this weekend.
Sheila Gilmore
Indeed. On Saturday, I was at just such a festival in my constituency. It was a beautiful day—the first sunny Saturday for some time. Volunteers from Castle credit union, who help to keep it going, were there for exactly the reasons the hon. Gentleman suggests. However, if, unlike credit unions, high-cost lenders have a high street presence—extremely attractive, brightly lit and hardly missable—it is much easier for people to find them.
Regrettably, only 2 % of people in the UK are members of a credit union. We can all work harder to increase that number, but one thing that would clearly help would be real resources to build the movement. Experience in my city is that real resources, far from being put in, are declining, and there are even fewer members. Despite the efforts of the volunteers who man stalls at local fairs and festivals, credit unions are not providing the competition we want with high-cost lenders. I should dearly like people to use credit unions instead of those institutions.
I understand that this is politics, but when Opposition Members make proposals we meet the accusation that Labour should have done things over the past 13 years, and it is suggested that the fact we did not debars our making proposals and expecting them to be listened to. I am sure that if my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow had been a Member during our period in government, she would have been harrying Ministers in exactly the same way as she has harried the Government over the past year. She would not have been afraid to speak.
We should not accept too lightly the suggestion that the previous Government did not look seriously at financial inclusion. The present Government say that they are interested in it too, but they do not put in the means to make it happen. It is not good enough to say they are interested. In my Westminster Hall debate, I referred to our manifesto proposal to oblige banks to provide basic bank accounts. The Minister’s response was, “Oh, we don’t really want that sort of regulation. We want it to be voluntary and we want to work with banks.” That is all too often the Government’s response. They say they want the ends, but they are not prepared to put in the means.
The previous Government did a lot of work on financial inclusion, but no one thing is enough: credit unions will not do it; basic bank accounts will not do it; and taking action against high-cost lenders alone will not do it. We need a range of measures.
Some of the steps that would help have been positively stopped by the Government. The growth fund, which helped to boost credit unions and other community-based financial institutions, has not been renewed or extended.
John McDonnell
My amendment proposes examination of the whole range of taxes, indirect and direct. It is interesting that the direct taxation system can be progressive in redistribution, but that the indirect system is so regressive in this country. It has a considerable impact on ensuring that we see these vast extremes of poverty and wealth.
It is not only the lobbyists from various organisations who have expressed their concerns about this inequality, because the general public are averse to high levels of inequality too. In recent surveys, 80% to 90% have been in favour of a more equal distribution of wealth in our society. We have had various discussions in this House about the impact of inequality, and none better than the debates around the work by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, “The Spirit Level”, which was ground-breaking.
Richard Wilkinson was an adviser to my party in the early 1990s, when he did the earliest work on the impact of inequality on health. That was revisited in 2005, when he came to the House and briefed several MPs. “The Spirit Level” confirmed what he had suspected in the 1990s and started the debate. The Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition have both accepted that inequality is an issue that must be addressed. In 2009, the Prime Minister quoted from Richard Wilkinson’s book in a major speech, demonstrating that the Conservative party at that time was keen to address some of the issues of inequality. He said that
“among the richest countries it’s the more unequal ones that do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator.”
In his first major speech as leader, the Leader of the Opposition said:
“I do believe that this country is too unequal and the gap between rich and poor doesn’t just harm the poor, it harms us all.”
That is based on the work in “The Spirit Level”.
The argument in “The Spirit Level” is straightforward—that when people in the same social class, at the same level of income and education, are compared across countries, those in more equal societies do better on every measurement, be it health, mortality, obesity, teenage birth rates or mental illness. Their quality of social relations is better too. Inequality is socially divisive, increasing the rate of homicide, hostility and racism. The level of trust in unequal societies is lower than in societies that are more equal, and social capital is less —the engagement in civil society and even in political processes. That is why we need to address the issue of inequality when we consider taxes and our financial strategy.
I realise that this has been a contentious debate, and I have read the arguments made by the TaxPayers Alliance, which has tried to rebut Wilkinson and Pickett’s work, but I have also read the more recent independent research studies that have simply reinforced the inequality argument. Whichever side of the argument Members fall, it is clearly an issue to be considered, and that is why I suggest that we look at taxation as a whole—
Stephen Williams
I agree with virtually everything that the hon. Gentleman has said. I have “The Spirit Level” at home and it will be part of my summer reading as I have not had time to read it yet. Does he at least acknowledge that one of the good things that the coalition Government have done is reduce the exposure to income tax of the lowest paid in society, while at the same time increasing capital gains tax? His Government did the reverse.
John McDonnell
The hon. Gentleman clearly has not been reading my alternative Budgets that I table year after year and which address some of those issues, although he is not alone in not having read them—but there you are!
The purpose of amendment 14 is to examine the issue again and regularly. The equality assessments that we receive from the Government in the budgetary papers consist of one sentence telling us who will gain and who will lose. They do not address the issue of inequality. A wider debate is needed, however, and my amendment would ensure that that debate is revisited and kept in close focus as we determine our financial policies. There have been previous attempts at this, and various reports by various governmental bodies have partly addressed the issue, but they have not been related to specific policy decisions or policy development.
This is more of a plea. The previous Government, of which I had occasional criticisms, set up an excellent initiative in founding the national equality panel under its chair, Professor John Hills. The panel still exists within the Home Office, and it produced a major report in January 2010 entitled, “An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK”. It was extremely detailed and brought together the evidence on economic inequality in our society. It was enlightening and depressing but at the same time motivating. It was enlightening because it exposed not only the scale of inequality but the trend growth over time, which, as I said, was only arrested in the previous decade, not reversed. It was depressing because, as the report stated, the sheer scale of inequalities in outcome—for instance, the sheer scale of differences in wealth—was shocking. The report even implied that it might be impossible to create a cohesive society given the scale of inequality.
The report identified a backdrop of widespread ignorance of the scale of inequality and the lack of awareness in society as a whole among the rich and the poor. It was not just the poor who did not realise how unequal society was; it was also the richest. The report was motivating because it demonstrated that public policy interventions can reduce inequality, particularly interventions around tax and welfare benefits. They can narrow gaps between the rich and the poor and create a more cohesive and successful society. My plea, through this amendment, is that before we agree tax levels, we address the issue of inequality and that we bring forward a further report. I suggest that the national equality panel continues its work, assesses the taxation policies set out in the Budget and brings a report back to the House so that we can be sure that the policies we are pursuing are addressing inequality in our society.
I am obviously aware that through the Child Poverty Act 2010 the previous Government set up the Child Poverty Commission, the remit of which has now been extended to include the issue of social mobility. I am sure that the commission could play a valuable role in assessing the tax decisions in the Finance Bill and their impact on inequality.